Immunotherapy succeeds in thwarting Type-1 diabetes in study

A form of immunotherapy gaining ground as a way to treat childhood food allergies has shown promise in treating another rising scourge of children and young adults: Type 1 diabetes.

In a small but rigorous clinical trial, British investigators gave patients recently diagnosed with the metabolic disorder a truncated version of the chemical that gives rise to insulin.

After a quarter-century of failed efforts to treat diabetes with an immune therapy, the experimental treatment appeared to quell the immune system’s assaults on the body’s insulin-production machinery. The authors of the new study call their experimental treatment “an appealing strategy for prevention,” both in the earliest stages of Type-1 diabetes and in children who are at high genetic risk of developing the disease.

Over the trial’s 12-month duration, eight newly diagnosed diabetic subjects who got a placebo treatment required steadily increasing insulin doses to maintain glycemic control. As their immune systems progressively destroyed the pancreatic cells that normally produce the essential hormone, their daily insulin use grew on average 50%.

The 19 subjects who got the experimental immunotherapy, however, continued to produce their own insulin. Among the subjects who got the experimental immunotherapy, the need for added shots of the hormone did not escalate in the year following their diagnosis.

The different metabolic trajectories of subjects in the trial’s control group and its active arm were evident at three months — the earliest point at which a surrogate marker for insulin production was measured.

The report of the early-stage clinical trial, published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, offers some preliminary reassurance that immunotherapy could be used safely in this growing population.

Source: Los Angeles Times